With all the power and possibilities of using cloud computing, how are people actually using the technology? You might just be surprised by this late 2012 data gathered and presented in this latest survey data.

From the latest survey in how people are using Cloud Computing, 41% of the people taking the survey say that they are using Cloud Computing for their external customer facing applications. In many ways this makes a lot of sense and is something that would be a good way to use Cloud Computing. This means that companies are not having to provision bandwidth, and can easily scale their external facing applications without having to purchase new hardware, software, or bandwidth. This also means that companies can be much quicker in responding to customer requests or spiky demand scenarios that happen depending on your industry. This also supports trusted providers and others that have a need for limited data sets from the companies providing this service.

Surprisingly though, 36% of the respondents said that they were using this to host their internal applications as well. I would think that companies would be more cautious about this, unless they are using a dedicated provider like Salesforce.com or travel, or companies that provide Software as a Service (SaaS) that a company might be using. I have a hard time with this one, unless they are going through a SaaS provider for those services, which could be easily associated with “being in the cloud”.

Looking forward, companies are using Cloud Computing for media, and big data munging. Big Data is turning into a good use for Cloud Computing due to the scalability of the Cloud and how easy it is to set up systems like Amazon’s Hadoop processes to do this. I have seen many research labs and research colleges saving significant money by scaling big data into the cloud. On media delivery this is also a viable option rather than trying to provision bandwidth and support via the companies assets. However, one down note though is in massive CGI rendering in the cloud as a render farm. If you buy rendering in the cloud as a service, you might be able to get a cost advantage rather than building your own render cloud, or purchasing hardware to do this. This one is still out for debate, and still waiting solid numbers to be reported back by companies.

Service providers are addressing cloud security issues, and helping ease that tension in the market place. The survey reported that “just 23 percent of respondents said they are concerned about the lack of perimeter defenses and network controls in the public cloud. Only eight percent voiced fear about providers having access to their guest servers, whereas 20 percent are worried about the multi-tenancy of the public cloud.”

Overall this paints an interesting picture where Cloud Computing will be going in 2013 and most likely well into 2014 as companies start working out how they will use the cloud, and what they hope to get out of it.

CloudPassage, an information security company that helps secure cloud computing resources, shared this data. There is no business relationship between this writer and CloudPassage.

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Dan Morrill works in Interactive Media and Cloud delivery systems for
Comics Forge as the COO. He has been blogging since 2003 covering
different emerging technologies, management and information security.
Dan works as a founding member of a number of startups, including
Startup Academy International and Dead Tree Comics. His interests are
in intellectual property protection, piracy, and information security
as it applies to cloud computing. He also has a deep interest in
media, mobile computing, and education.. His personal blog is here, his other pro-blog is here .

4 responses to “How are people using Cloud Computing?”

Some great data here. I would hope this means that more organizations — especially SMBs — are taking the time to align with business needs (using tools like VMware and HP offer). It’s also promising to see the ongoing concern around cloud security. Regardless of provider, businesses need to remember they are the only one truly responsible for protecting customer data.